The Bay Area International Children’s Film Festival, founded last year as a one-day event by a group of parents whose children attend the Renaissance School in Oakland, will be held Saturday and Sunday at Michaan’s Auctions, the restored Art Deco movie
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Local Mozart aficionados look forward all year to the series of concerts presented at cities around the Bay Area by the Midsummer Mozart Festival under the direction of Maestro George Cleve. All year long, “spite of despondence” as Keats says, we draw comfort from our eager anticipation of the exciting Mozartean gifts that Cleve will unwrap for us at the July concerts. In the last few years, we have occasionally received a lagniappe in the form of a benefit concert, and this year is no exception with the extra event scheduled for Mozart’s 254th geburtstag on Sunday, Jan. 24, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club.
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An “eternal juvenile” no more, Dick Powell finally broke free of the battery of baby-faced roles he endured in a seemingly endless series of bright-eyed 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. With middle age fast approaching, Powell struggled to carve out a new identity for himself, jumping ship from one studio to another in search of a new career path.
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Where have the mourning doves and hummingbirds gone? I used to hear a pair of murmuring doves as they explored, not silently, the sidewalk and nearby rooftop of my north Berkeley neighborhood. And hummingbirds flitted at feeders containing sugar water that hung from balconies (where permitted) and porches. Rachel Carson’s two favorite kinds of birds were the veery, a member of the thrush family, and the tern, a small, black-capped gull-like bird with forked tail.
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There's nothing like silence to focus the eye. In her low-fi experimental films of the 1970s, Chantal Akerman trained her camera on everyday life and allowed for no distractions. Without sound, without action — indeed, with little motion — she opened her lens to the commonplace, to the mundane, and taught her audience to look that much deeper at what lay before them.
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